Out from the cold: Snowden leaks forced British spies’ pullout from Russia, China - report

A television screen shows former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden during a news bulletin at a cafe at the Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport (Reuters / Sergey Karpukhin) / Reuters

The British MI6 secret service had to suspend operations of its field agents due to imminent exposure in “hostile” countries such as Russia and China, caused by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaks, the Sunday Times reports.

The Sunday Times alleges that both Moscow and Beijing have
succeeded in cracking top-secret encrypted documents leaked by
Snowden and thus learnt MI6’s methods.

The British media outlet cited unnamed officials in Prime
Minister David Cameron’s office, the Home Office and national
security services.

An official in PM Cameron’s cabinet said that as far as he knew
there was “no evidence of anyone being harmed,” although
allegedly Britain had been deprived of the opportunity to get the
information it wanted.

“It is the case that the Russians and Chinese have
information. It has meant agents have had to be moved and that
knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital
information,” the Sunday Times was told.

At the same time, another senior British official said Snowden
had “blood on his hands.”

Russia and China will be going through Snowden’s material
“for years to come,” in order to find clues to identify
potential agents, a British intelligence source told the media
outlet.

“Snowden has done incalculable damage,” he said, saying
evacuation of agents was a forced necessity because otherwise
they would have been “identified and killed.”

Russia and China gaining access to Snowden’s material became a
“huge strategic setback” that harmed Britain, America
and other NATO member states, said Sir David Omand, the former
director of GCHQ.

The damage caused by Snowden was “far greater than what has
been admitted,” a US intelligence source told the Sunday
Times.

In an email to a former US Senator written in July 2013, Snowden
said one of his specializations was “to teach our people at
DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in
the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e.
China).”

“No intelligence service—not even our own—has the capacity to
compromise the secrets I continue to protect,” the fugitive
whistleblower said.

The Sunday Times reports that not only British agents, but spies
of other Western agencies were evacuated from the countries they
operated in on security grounds.

Former US National Security Services contractor Edward Snowden,
who fled to Russia via Hong Kong in June 2013, is believed to
have collected some 1.7 million documents from US government
computers. He has leaked them to journalists in order to secure
"privacy and basic liberties" worldwide.

Edward Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in August 2013.

Scandalous revelations about indiscriminate global mass
surveillance sparked mass outrage from people and governments
around the world. As a result of this unprecedented intelligence
leak, the NSA and British GCHQ became the most affected agencies.
They had to completely rethink their information security
procedures.

'Attempt to gag Snowden, other whistleblowers'

Lode Vanoost, the former deputy speaker of the Belgian
parliament, said the so-called report is speculation used every
now and then to make sure public opinion is influenced against
Snowden’s revelations.

“The only thing I wonder about when I hear these so-called
revelations is why now? This is absolutely no surprise, it is
standard procedure when you attack the messenger and not talk
about the message,” he told RT.

“If they claim that agents had to be replaced or were put in
harm’s way, well agents and spies are being moved all the time
for lots of reasons, so is it any different from before? We don’t
know that, it’s merely speculative,” he added.

Matteo Bergamini, from the alternative news network Shout Out UK,
said these allegations are harmful only to one person and that is
Snowden, “who has done a service to democracy.”

“The British and US governments can’t spy on their own
citizens as easily as they did beforehand. I don’t see how he has
blood on his hands. It’s about making the person [Snowden] seem
like a criminal and other whistleblowers, and stopping them doing
this again,” he told RT.

The former British
ambassador to Uzbekistan and whistleblower, Craig Murray, who was
fired in 2004 over his claims of British complicity in torture,
rejected the Sunday Times’ claims as nonsense, saying that even
the source the paper is citing looks somewhat fake.

“The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed
by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense,” Murray wrote in
his blog. “Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6
officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden
documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’
identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor
a description that would allow them to be identified.”

Moreover, Murray says the alleged Downing Street source quoted by
the Sunday Times made a “schoolboy mistake” confusing
officers and agents. “MI6 is staffed by officers. Their
informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a
secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge
comes from fiction frequently confuse the two.”